Exploring interest intermediation in Central and Eastern European healthcare : Persistent statism, unfettered pluralism or a shift to corporatism?

Abstract

This chapter contributes to our understanding of interest intermediation structures in CEE and, specifically, whether, which, how and to what extent organized interests are incorporated into policy-making processes. The authors focus on healthcare policy in Poland, Hungary and Slovenia and address a series of questions: Have corporatist platforms emerged to promote social partnership? Do institutions exist to balance organizationally privileged, i.e. concentrated interests, and more disadvantaged, i.e. diffuse interests? Do rivalling interest groups consult regularly with the state and with one another? Or is policy-making characterized by a pluralist “free-for-all” and fleeting alliances between the state and various advocacy groups? Or, alternatively, is policy-making still driven by a top-down, technocratic state-centred logic? The authors address the extent to which these interest intermediation systems are gravitating towards a more corporatist policy-making paradigm and how the new wave of national conservatism affects interest intermediation. To do so, they offer a complex operationalization of corporatism based on concrete indicators and present the results of a survey which grasps interactions between organized interests and governing parties, oppositional parties, regulatory authorities as well as the degree of policy coordination and political exchange with the state and between rivalling organizations.